By the age of nineteen, Raven has spent most of her life in the
sprawling slums of America, fighting as a rebel against the
dictatorship. When the rebellion steals an experimental time-travel
device, she travels back five decades to the year 2013. Her plan:
assassinate the future dictator when he is still young and vulnerable,
long before he comes to power. She must move fast to reshape history,
because agents from her own time are on her trail, ready to execute her
on sight.

Her hands were red with
blood, but the cold rain washed it away.Whose blood?She couldn’t
remember.

She became aware of pain
throughout her body.Freezing water and
tiny hailstones lashed her face as she stumbled through a storm.Dying thunder echoed in her ears, and
crackles of lightning faded in the night around her.

A pair of lights rushed
toward her through the darkness, but her brain couldn’t interpret what her eyes
saw.A long screech ripped through her
ears, followed by shrill bleats.

Car horns, she realized as the lights loomed closer.Through her thick, fuzzy brain, it dawned on
her that she was staggering along a multi-lane road, seconds away from getting
splattered across the oncoming grill of an eighteen-wheeled truck.

She discerned a dark space
off to her left and moved into it, stepping from hard pavement into squishy wet
earth.The truck that had nearly killed
her squealed past as the driver braked, dousing her with a wave of cold
mud.Horns blew at the stopped truck
blocking up the left lane.

She rubbed her eyes and
tried to grasp her surroundings—a grass median dividing an interstate highway,
up to her ankles in frigid mud.

She couldn’t remember
where she was, or how she’d come to be there.After a moment’s reflection, she realized she wasn’t entirely sure who
she was, either.

Raven, she remembered.She
clung to that word like a lifeline. My
name is Raven.It is now, anyway.She’d once had a different name, but that
original, scribbled-on-the-birth-certificate name no longer mattered.

She wore black boots and a
long black jacket.A backpack weighed
down her shoulders, but she didn’t know what it contained.She trudged on weak, trembling legs toward an
overpass bridge ahead.Once she was out
of the downpour, she could gather her brains and figure things out.She didn’t seem to be bleeding, so the blood
on her hands must not have been her own.

“Hey!Hey there, girl!You all right?” shouted the truck driver who
had almost flattened her.More cars
honked and swerved to avoid crashing into the back of his trailer, which was
decorated with puffy pink sheep.

Raven squinted up at
him.The man was in his forties,
severely overweight, with a handlebar mustache and scratchy, graying beard
stubble.His blue and white cap read: MoonPie:
The Original Marshmallow Sandwich!

“I’m fine!” she shouted
through the downpour. “Keep going!”

“You got a car?” he asked.

“No,” she told him. “I
don’t think so.”

“Where you headed?”

“I don’t know.”

“The troopers gonna lock
you up if they see you!You drunk or
what?”

“I don’t think so.” She
raised a hand to her mouth to check her breath.Not drunk.

The trucker eyed her up
and down, a soaking wet girl stumbling along the interstate alone at night, and
then he swung open the passenger door.

“Best climb on up in here
with me,” he said. “Gonna freeze your pants off out there.”

Raven looked at the gruff,
obese man and the warm, sheltered transport he was offering, and then at the
overpass bridge in the distance.Her
legs were rubbery.She might not make it
to the overpass before she collapsed.

“Lady, I got to get
moving,” he said. “You want a ride to the exit or what?”

“Yeah,” Raven said.She had no reason to trust him, but he seemed
soft-bodied and slow.If he tried to get
rough, she would break his wrists.Even
in her current state, she knew she could take him if he pushed her to it.

Raven stumbled around to
the passenger side and struggled to climb with her weakened limbs until he took
her arms and pulled her up.

“Thanks,” she whispered,
still shivering.She was almost too weak
to pull the door closed.

“Just glad you ain’t tore
in half.” He settled back into the driver’s seat, and it groaned under his
weight. “You musta been one, two, three, four inches from me.Or less.Just popped up outta nowhere when that lightning hit.” He drove
cautiously through the storm. “Didn’t seem like no normal lightning, you ask
me.What was you doing out there?That big flash hit the road, then you come
stumbling out....Did the lightning get you?”

“I don’t know,” she said.The interior of the cab smelled like cigarette smoke and old
hamburgers.A collage of small objects
was glued to the dashboard—action figures, an old watch face, postcards, salt
and pepper shakers.Hail clattered on
the cab’s roof.

“You don’t know?” he asked.

“Sorry.” Raven shrugged off her backpack and set it on the
floor between her wet boots.She wanted
to see what was inside it, but not while he was watching.

“It’s Jebbie, by the way.” He offered his calloused hand,
and she hesitated a moment before taking it. “Jebbie Walters.From Yazoo City, Mississippi.You got a name, darling?”

“Angela.That’s my
name,” Raven said.She knew not to trust
a stranger with data about herself.He
might be the enemy, and she felt informants and spies were everywhere, looking
to report those who resisted.

“Huh.Where you from,
Angela?”

She tried to remember, but finally shrugged.

“You ain’t gotta tell me,” he said. “You going north?Cause that’s where I’m going, way up north of
here.You might want to hop out quick if
that ain’t your plan.”

“I’m not sure.”

“You ain’t sure about much of nothing, are you?”

“Not right now,” Raven
said.

“I guess I ought to drop
you up at the exit.”

“You can.” Raven shrugged.
“I think I’m lost.”

He looked her over again.
“Tell you what.About three, four, five
miles from here’s a good spot, the Big Porcupine Travel Plaza.Got showers, motel rooms, an
all-night-you-can-eat place.We could
stop there, get you a place to sleep.Maybe in the morning you’ll start to remembering things.I figure you just need to sleep it off.You’re on drugs or something, ain’t you?”

“Maybe,” Raven said.

He laughed. “It’s okay by
me.I don’t do drugs, myself.Just pills and booze.Well, you think about what you want to do.”

He turned up the radio,
where a woman sang a slow, gentle song that Raven gradually recognized.Someone—her mother?—had once played it on the
piano.It was an old song called “The
Rose.”

“Uh, sorry.” Jebbie
blushed pink and spun the radio knob. “I, uh, usually find a good honky-tonk or
country gold station.Don’t know how my
radio ended up on that soft-rock junk, or whatever that was.Yeah, here we go.” He found a song with a
steel guitar and a man singing about his wife leaving him for his boss.

Raven looked at herself in
the rain-streaked side mirror.She was
about twenty years old, maybe nineteen.That felt right.Her black hair
was pulled into a short ponytail with a rubber band.She wore all black: boots, fatigues, blouse,
backpack, jacket.The knee-length jacket
was made of a stretchy artificial material with a texture like a crocodile’s
back.She felt a web of metallic fibers
between the layers of leathery fabric. That’s
armor, she realized, and she wondered why she might need armor.Her only jewelry was on her left wrist, a
thin silver bracelet with a large moonstone.

She tried to reach back in
time with her mind.She’d been stumbling
along the highway.The moment before
that: what?It was a solid blank slate,
as though a giant magnet had wiped her brain clean.Perhaps the trucker was right, and she’d been
struck by lightning.

By the age of nineteen, Raven has spent most of her life in the sprawling slums
of America, fighting as a rebel against the dictatorship. When the rebellion
steals an experimental time-travel device, she travels back five decades to the
year 2013. Her plan: assassinate the future dictator when he is still young and
vulnerable, long before he comes to power. She must move fast to reshape
history, because agents from her own time are on her trail, ready to execute
her on sight.

J.L. Bryan studied English
literature at the University of Georgia and at Oxford, with a focus on English
Renaissance and Romantic literature. He also studied screenwriting at UCLA. He
lives in the metro Atlanta sprawl with his wife Christina, where he spends most
of his day serving the toddler and animal community inside his house.He is the author of the Paranormals series
and the Songs of Magic series.(His book
Jenny Pox is currently free
on Kindle, Nook, Apple, Sony,
Kobo,
and Smashwords!)

J.L. Bryan studied English
literature at the University of Georgia and at Oxford, with a focus on
English Renaissance and Romantic literature. He also studied
screenwriting at UCLA. He lives in the metro Atlanta sprawl with his
wife Christina, where he spends most of his day servings the toddler and
animal community inside his house. He is the author of the Paranormals
series and the Songs of Magic series.